Director of Product Engineering

About the Role

We're looking for a Director of Product Engineering to lead Twelve Labs’ agentic platform and related developer experience (APIs, SDKs & tooling) that enables developers to build video-native agents—while also owning flagship end-user applications that validate and accelerate the platform. You will own the full journey from agent capabilities to production user applications. You'll build and lead multiple engineering teams, drive execution with speed and predictability, and shape the technical direction of our product stack.

This is a role for a builder who leads from the front. You're deeply technical, close to the code on the things that matter, and energized by the challenge of shipping high-quality products in a fast-moving AI company. You pair strong people leadership with the judgment to make sound technical and product trade-offs under ambiguity.

• Drive the development of Twelve Labs' video agent platform:

  • Video ingestion & indexing that enables complex agentic workflows

  • Agent orchestration runtime and core capabilities such as planning, tool use, multi-step reasoning

  • Tooling for evaluation, observability, and debugging

  • Reliability, latency, and cost-to-serve for agent workflows

  • Safety/guardrails for agent actions

• Own the end-to-end delivery of flagship end-user applications — from concept through launch and iteration.

• Own the platform product surface: API design and SDKs

Own Delivery & Execution

• Own delivery, quality, and operational excellence across your teams.

• Drive fast, predictable release cycles: planning, weekly reviews, and retrospectives that lead to improvements.

• Translate product and company goals into clear technical plans, milestones, and timelines. Make trade-offs explicit and manage dependencies across teams.

Build and Lead the Org

• Build, lead, and grow your teams (through TLMs and Senior/Staff ICs).

• Hire exceptional talent and raise the bar continuously. Coach and develop leaders, manage performance decisively, and build clear growth paths for managers and ICs alike.

• Create a culture of ownership, speed, and craft — where teams ship with urgency but never sacrifice reliability or user experience.

Technical Excellence & Architecture

• Stay hands‑on where it matters most: architectural decisions, critical‑path code reviews, and high‑risk technical areas.

• Set and enforce a high quality bar across the stack: testing strategy, performance, reliability, observability, and CI/CD practices.

• Own production readiness: instrumentation, incident hygiene, latency, security and cost-to-serve.

Partner Across the Organization

• Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Research to define product direction and ensure engineering execution matches the product vision.

• Work closely with modeling teams to translate model capabilities into reliable, production‑grade product features.

• Represent engineering in leadership forums and contribute to company‑wide technical strategy.

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience

• 7+ years of engineering leadership experience leading multiple teams (through Engineering Managers and Staff+ Individual Contributors).

• Experience building intelligent or agentic systems: agent platforms, tool‑use frameworks, multi‑step orchestration, or autonomous workflows on top of foundation models. You understand both the product surface and the underlying system complexity these require.

• Track record of shipping delightful, polished end‑user experiences — you care deeply about what customers see, touch, and feel, and you hold a high bar for product quality, responsiveness, and craft.customer-facing

• Strong system design instincts with the ability to review architecture, challenge assumptions, and guide high‑quality technical decisions

• Demonstrated experience building high‑velocity engineering cultures: small batches, rapid iteration, tight feedback loops, and a bias toward getting working software in front of users quickly.

• Excellent people leadership: hiring world‑class engineers, performance management, coaching, and growing future engineering leaders. You've built teams that ship fast and sustain quality.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to align cross‑functional teams around priorities, trade‑offs, and deadlines.

• Experience with video pipelines, video understanding, or multimodal systems.

• Background in building both developer platforms (APIs, SDKs, developer tools) and consumer‑facing applications.

• Startup experience, especially in high‑growth or early‑stage environments.

• Prior experience partnering closely with applied ML or research teams to product ionize model capabilities.